> Meta told a two-day court hearing in August it had already committed to ask for consent from users and that Datatilsynet used an "expedited process" that was unnecessary and did not give the company enough time to answer.
So, in other words, Meta is complaining that Datatilsynet moved fast and broke things. Interesting.
School starting times are one of the worst things for night owls and I hope ongoing research helps to raise awareness and bring change so night owl kids don't needlessly have to suffer for 10+ years.
I long thought having different school starting/ending times is the way to go. Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11.
Standing up at 8 is hard for me and I'm happy to be in a job where I can start working at 10, but here in Bavaria school starts at 08:15 and I had to set my alarm to 06:30 for a huge part of my life even tho I rarely fell asleep before 00:30,sometimes much later. The result was that I regularly missed a day of school, because I was just too tired to go. Luckily my parents were supportive.
Also my performance on the 8am classes was much worse than on later classes. In university I skipped all 8am lectures and even skipped early exams and waited for a "better scheduled" exam.
The worst part about it was how non-understanding all the early-birds are. They just didn't grasp that asking me to be awake and productive at 8am was like asking them to do work after 11pm and that "just go to bed earlier" isn't a working solution. Just ignorance of a different rythm.
This touches on one of my least favorite things when reviewing code: "stutter".
A common example is what happens when you have an object that should just be a function (or static in javaland):
from io import reader
reader = reader.Reader()
reader.read(file)
Oof. Just
import io
io.read(file)
Similarly when you have method names that share information with the class and arguments.
BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader()
bufferedReader.readBuffer(buffer)
Now languages support stuff to reduce this, like `val`, but still! When designing apis/interfaces, consider what they'll look like to a user and don't force your end users to stutter.
I've worked in typesetting software a long time. And I've seen several OSS projects reach roughly the point this one has before dying. I can recall only one or two that made it significantly past this point. The challenge is not the coding but the domain problems. It's easy to get a core set of features with very basic operations going. But pushing on into the required capabilities for more than markdown-level formatting is very, very difficult. The issues are mirages, b/c they appear easy to explain, but they're extremely difficult to implement.
For example, footnotes. We all understand how footnotes should be placed--right there at the bottom of the page. However, placement become very difficult if you have a long footnote that appears in the before-last-line of the page. Now, if you include the footnote, there's not enough room for the last few lines of regular text, and the footnoted word is bumped to the next page. Figuring out how to get out of this one problem algorithmically involves heavy-duty backtracking work, projections of layout, recalculations, etc. Its difficulty is compounded if other factors enter in. For example, if the text and footnote appear just before a full page image, etc.
Another classic difficulty is widow and orphan control. Knuth's algorithm on this topic alone requires almost 100 pages to explain [Digital Typography, 1999].
And so on. Suffice it to say that Donald Knuth spent 10 years writing TeX, much of which he did full-time, supported by various grants.
Typesetting is a really, really hard problem domain and while the author here expects to add features like equations soon, to those of us in the field, it feels like he doesn't really grok the difficulty of the problem domain.
The odds are small that he can climb the cliff in front of him unless he's willing to work on this full time for a very long time.
So, in other words, Meta is complaining that Datatilsynet moved fast and broke things. Interesting.